The players on FGCU ended up there, at a 16-year-old institution with a 6-year-old basketball program that’s in its second year of eligibility for the tournament, playing for someone who never had been a head coach at any level because ...

— Nobody else wanted them.

— Or they didn’t want to leave home.

— Or both.

Sophomore point guard Brett Comer, quarterback on the alley-oop of the season in Friday’s win, was third-team all-state as a senior at Winter Park High School outside of Orlando. The first-team backcourt was Winter Park teammate Austin Rivers, now in the NBA, and Shane Larkin, now of ACC champion Miami.

He had committed at the start of his junior year to play at Florida Atlantic for Mike Jarvis, but Comer’s father, who helped teach him the game, died during that year. He has a tattoo on his right bicep dedicated to his father.

Although Colorado State and UMass showed interest, he said, he no longer was interested in going away from home, pulling out of his FAU commitment in his senior year.

“I really didn’t want to leave my mom. That was the biggest thing to me, not wanting to leave her," Comer said Saturday, adding that he thought about playing literally in town, at Division II Rollins. “She told me wherever I would go, she would move there, and I didn’t want her to go too far out of her way. So I thought it was the perfect gift to give to her, for everything.”

Junior forward Chase Fieler, Comer’s lob partner, got two other Division I offers, from James Madison and Eastern Kentucky, out of high school in Parkersburg, W.Va., where he was third in the 2010 state player-of-the-year voting. (Noah Cottrill, who had a brief and troubled stint at West Virginia, was the winner.) Ohio University, where both his parents were athletes, did not offer him.

“Other than that, it was Division II or prep schools," he said.

Like more than half of the roster, Fieler was recruited by current coach Andy Enfield’s predecessor, Dave Balza. He still got a familiar-sounding pitch that drew him away from the established programs.

“This is brand-new, and this is one of the things they told me when they recruited me—I’ll be making history here no matter what I do,’’ Fieler said. “And we’re doing it. We’re making this kind of history, not just school history but national history, and it’s unbelievable."

Senior guard Sherwood Brown, the Atlantic Sun conference player of the year and leading scorer against Georgetown with 24 points, averaged 11 points a game as a high-school senior in Orlando. When he says nobody wanted him, he means it—he walked on at a program that did not exist when he was in fourth grade.

“I like to think of myself as a late bloomer," Brown said, pointing out that he was just 6-2 and 175 pounds and had just turned 17 during his senior year of high school. “I didn’t really have the physical attributes that I have right now (listed at 6-4, 200). ... I just got bigger. I hit the weight room, and I don’t know, it just happened overnight.

“Even with me being that small, I played against a lot of great players in high school. Now that I’m a lot bigger, I’m a lot more physical and I’m not intimidated by anybody.”

Redshirt senior forward Eddie Murray averaged just 8.0 points a game as a high school senior in North Fort Myers, 20 minutes from the still-developing FGCU campus. His biggest claim to fame, to hear him tell, was finishing second in a dunk contest at a high school tournament, behind Philadelphia Eagles cornerback Brandon Boykin. Only fellow Atlantic Sun members recruited him, he said.

Sophomore guard Bernard Thompson, who scored 23 on Friday, was the No. 89-rated shooting guard in the high school class of 2011 coming out of Conyers, Ga.

Sophomore forward Eric McKnight is one of three power-conference transfers on the roster—the Raleigh, N.C., native took all of 15 shots in 14 games at Iowa State as a freshman in 2010-11.

That’s the team that dominated Georgetown—co-Big East champion, with All-American Otto Porter and the league’s coach of the year, John Thompson III—for the last three-quarters of an NCAA Tournament game. It’s the team that much of America is now rooting wildly for, on Sunday night (7:10 p.m. ET, TBS) against San Diego State with a Sweet 16 berth at stake.

It wasn’t exactly a 100-percent, top-to-bottom whiff by recruiters from more prestigious, established, recognizable programs. Recruiting, it should never be forgotten, is much more of a crapshoot than the expert analysts, tracking websites and gurus portray it.

“It would be different if these guys were 24, 25 years old,” Duke coach Mike Krzyzewski said Saturday. “You’re dealing with 18- to 23-year-old kids who, even the really good ones, have not yet fully developed into being the outstanding players they will be.

“Kids mature in different ways. You might have a kid who’s really good at 19, and compare him to another guy, and that guy is not ready—but at 21, he’s his equal.”

That’s almost verbatim Enfield’s program-building philosophy.

“We have some of the most-improved players in the country on our team this year,” Enfield said. “They’ve made huge jumps, and I think that’s big in selling that recruiting. Players don’t walk into college ready for the most part—if they are, they’re playing for Duke and Carolina and Kentucky.”

For the most part, for various reasons, high school was not the FGCU players’ time to shine—not the way it was for the more recognizable names in college basketball.